Academy Institutes Research Fund awards for third time

For the third year in succession, the Academy Institutes Research Fund has awarded grants to three new research proposals. The three proposals are an historical study of social mobility among Dutch Jews, research on how changes in the life cycle impact health, and an investigation of brain disorders.

Against the current: The social mobility of Dutch Jews (1880-1940)

Two Academy institutes, Huygens ING and the International Institute of Social History (IISH), are planning to join forces in a study that will explore the integration process of Dutch Jews. For centuries, the vast majority of Jews in the Netherlands belonged to a disadvantaged minority whose lives were marked by spatial segregation, poverty, crime, and a strong focus on their faith. The study will draw parallels with the position of some of the descendants of Turkish and Moroccan migrants who settled in the Netherlands from the 1970s onwards.

Encouraging healthy behaviour in society is one of the main objectives of social and medical science. Wide-ranging research into existing health and mortality rates underscores this. The Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI), the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) and the University Medical Centre Groningen (UMGC) plan to work together to develop a new perspective on health-related behaviour. The project will focus on the impact of selection and causality in relation to socioeconomic status, life cycle transitions and health-related behaviour.

Advancing clinical and cognitive neuroscience by microvascular fMRI: unmixing vascular contributions in fundamental neuroscience and brain disorders in the living human brain

Researchers at the Spinoza Centre and the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience/Netherlands Brain Bank (NIN/NBB) and their partner Amsterdam University Medical Centre (AUMC) will join forces in studying the smallest blood vessels in the living human brain. The study will involve developing new MRI methods for the 7 Tesla MRI scanner at the Spinoza Centre. The focus will be on functional MRI, the object being to make circulation in the smallest capillaries visible in healthy and diseased brains.

Academy Institutes Research Fund

In its Strategic Agenda for 2016-2020, Science and Scholarship Connect, the Academy announced that it wished to foster closer ties in research at its institutes. One of the steps that it has taken is to set up the Academy Institutes Research Fund. The fund makes an annual grant of 1.5 million euros available to Academy institutes that undertake research projects together. Previous awards were made in 2016 and 2017.